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Jan. 23, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:33
64 Roads (Part 1)

Getting from A to B the free market way!: Initial thoughts from a roads scholar (groan!)

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Good morning, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It is Monday.
It's a little early than I normally go to work, but I think I will somehow make it.
It is 7.50, January the 23rd, 2006.
I have to go in a little early this morning because I have a meeting with a client and because the world is evil and makes me get up early on a Monday.
Now, of course, for those of you who have young children, this would probably represent a big sleep, a big lie-in, as they say in England, but for me, not so much.
So I hope you're doing well.
I had an interesting email on the weekend from a gentleman who was taking the approach of talking about a stateless society with his father.
Now this is a conversation that is fraught with emotional overtones, just so you know.
If you start to talk to your parents about a stateless society, they will, unless they are very mature, which is to say unless they don't exist, they will absolutely take this as a criticism, an unconscious criticism, of their parenting.
I've heard this from a number of people.
As soon as you say, I think society can live without a government, because the government is destructive, corrupt, and evil, well, then parents will generally think that you are talking about their own parenting, and it will likely become a very heated discussion.
There's a reason why people can't talk about something like anarchism, which is a technical moral topic.
I mean, you know, minimizing the state is one thing, right?
But getting rid of the state completely is a very volatile topic for people.
And the reason is because of their own parenting.
I mean, usually, I don't want to sound overly psychological, but you are going to have some very interesting chats with your family if you start to talk about The fact that people can get by without a coercive and overbearing authority.
Again, unless you are... And I have known parents like this.
I really have.
There was a gentleman that I grew up with, and I was best man at his wedding, and for many years we were very close.
And his father was just wonderful.
His father taught engineering, actually was the head of the engineering department at U of T, was very kind, a Persian fellow, as he always corrected people who thought he was Iranian, and just a wonderful man.
It was a wonderful family.
They had great discussions around the dinner table like You know, should you tell your children about Santa Claus, right?
I mean, and the pros and cons of that.
And, of course, I came down on the no side even when I was in my teens.
Not just to be contrarian, but I think that it is a kind of sort of kiss-and-hug sadism to tell your children about Santa Claus, they always talk about, it's the wonder of the children, and it's like, no, it's the naivety of the children, and it's an exercise in power to tell your children things that are false as if they're true, and I just think it's a bad idea in general, but not one of the most important philosophical topics in the world.
But, and I never discussed, I remember discussing with his wife, the British Empire, Back when I was pro-Empire, for a variety of silly reasons we won't get into here, and there was never a strong I guess, a fence catalyst that you see so much with people, right?
Where, you know, I was on an interview, as I mentioned, with somebody who called in, and I was talking about the Stateless Society and charity and so on, and I was on an interview show, and a gentleman called in who was a paraplegic.
Now, of course, nobody likes anybody more than the person who picks on the paraplegic, so that was quite an exciting challenge from a communication standpoint.
And so I had to sort of tread that one rather delicately.
It was theinfidelguy.com interview.
But there is a lot of volatility in things.
You know, when I remember talking with my mother about the A healthcare system that would be privatized.
And, of course, as a hypochondriac, she viewed this with, you know, unconsciously great alarm, right?
And, of course, her parenting was somewhat arbitrary.
So, there is a lot of volatility when you get into this stuff with people, and it has to do with their own histories, right?
If my theory is correct, and we've all been raised really badly, then, you know, we all have kind of a lot of problems, because we've been raised really badly.
And it's not, you know, it's not all our parents' fault.
Because there just simply weren't the tools around to raise people in a rational way, raise children rationally, and of course there really aren't that many around now, but at least there's a possibility.
And that's all going to come up, right?
Your own past, their own past.
One's relationship to authority, one's relationship to violence, one's relationship to Dominance, what is called obedience, of course for many people comes up when you talk about anarchy or anarcho-capitalism.
And generally there's a lot of emotional overtones that are quite strong that it's important to be aware of when you're getting in.
And I've talked about, this is sort of separate from the argument for morality, The argument from morality is powerful enough, and you can use that with even some sort of a limited state approach like objectivism or libertarianism, but if you use the argument from morality in a consistent manner, which means that you have to advocate anarcho-capitalism, then you really are going to face some fireworks, and it is risky.
It is very risky.
I had a gentleman who sent me a wonderful, a sensitive, powerful, amazing email.
And he was talking about, he'd listened to some of my conversations about religion.
And he was talking about how his own parents were religious, his father was a pastor, but really disliked organized religion, just kind of did it for the money.
Because, you know, it's a pretty sweet gig if you're kind of amoral.
And he was talking about how his mother came home and said, I just converted someone at work to a Christian.
And then she burst into tears, right?
It was a very volatile emotional situation, but it's entirely and exactly the kind of emotional hell that, you know, long-term religion produces.
And, you know, very difficult, you know, and he was in his teens.
I put a lot of time into reply to him because, of course, you know, the young of the future, right?
I mean, we want to talk to as many young people as we can, and in any choice, you know, between talking to somebody who's older and somebody who's younger, I would always pick the younger person because
They still have enough proximity to their own dominance as children to remember that the state is not some abstract lovely entity, and also they haven't sort of invested themselves in one manner or another in a kind of false authority, like being a parent or a boss or a teacher themselves, where they're going to feel guilty if something comes up like that.
So, I would say that just be aware of how volatile this stuff is when you get into it with people.
They really will tend to get rather upset.
You know, especially if you end up talking to somebody who used to be in the military or who knows someone who is.
A cop, of course, a prison guard, and all this sort of stuff.
I mean, there's a lot of... You'll get a lot of blankness, you'll get a lot of ridicule, and if you continue to be persistent, you'll get a lot of hostility.
And it's up to you, of course, how much of that you want to do.
The purpose of life is not to save the world, but to be happy.
It just makes me happy doing my tiny bit to try to save the world.
But depending on how much you like it, do it or don't do it.
But just recognize that once you cross this line with people, the argument for morality, especially plus anarcho-capitalism, Unless you can sway them and they're curious about your ideas, which is pretty rare.
You know, your relationship with them in sort of a fundamental manner is kind of done, right?
You can't say that you now have defined evil to be such-and-such and the other person says, well, I agree with such-and-such and, you know, let's go bowling.
It's just not going to happen.
I mean, you can thrash around and continue with it, but as soon as you have become clear about what is right and wrong, and other people fall into the category of not-so-much-with-the-rightness, then you're going to face the hollowing out of that relationship.
It's inevitable.
I, for one, think it's worth it, and it's not because I enjoy rejecting people, but you can't be happy if you're mired in moral error or intellectual error.
Intellectual error is somewhat survivable, but moral error, you simply can't be happy.
I didn't sort of make our conscience.
I didn't make the way human beings think and work.
I've just sort of noticed that that is the case.
And of course, I'm far from the first one to notice it, right?
I mean, every moralist in the history of the world has sort of said the same thing.
It's just that my demand is that morality be entirely logically consistent, since it deals with physical things like human beings.
It has to have the same rigor, at least as the biological sciences, if not to some degree logically, at least the physical sciences.
So, the gentleman who wrote me in about his, you know, he called it a heated discussion with his father and I can imagine how it went.
There were two sort of fundamental issues that he had questions about.
He was, and full credit to him, I mean, how fantastic is this?
He managed to deal with the standard objection of balkanization and civil war and organized crime and so on, and that's not easy to do.
I mean, I took a shot at it a number of times on the Infidel Guy show, But I didn't really have any luck.
I did have a little bit of luck.
You sort of get a weird ripple in the room, even in your own mind, when someone connects with the truth.
It's a very powerful moment.
And I did get it once or twice when I was talking about this, right?
Because they, of course, had this theory that if you have no government, everyone's going to fragment into these endlessly warring little fiefdoms, right?
And so I decided not to take the argument for morality approach because it was getting late in the show and that takes a while.
So I just pointed out that why would people do it?
Because why would people wage a war if they're Balkanized?
It's going to be a problem, right?
Small countries generally don't declare war unless they have a large government.
In fact, you can't really have war without a government because, as I sort of mentioned in my podcast yesterday and in an article I helped to get to Lou, you can't have a war unless you can shift the cost of destruction onto the taxpayers, right?
So without a state it's very hard to even have a war.
So what would be the point?
And I did sort of get a connection with them on the, you know, you can't have a war economically unless there are taxpayers to pay for the cost of destruction and rebuilding.
So, All kudos to him for managing to pull that one off, because that's a very difficult one to get.
Also, kudos to him for having the restraint or the maturity, or the generosity, I guess you could say, to a small degree, to not be offended.
The one thing that you'll find as you get into this topic with people is that they will state the blindingly obvious as if You've never thought of it, as if you're a complete idiot.
Since every single human being who ever has contemplated the idea of getting rid of the state, one of the first thoughts that comes into their mind is, wouldn't society just dissolve into a war of petty principalities?
You know, people will just say to you, well, that won't work because, right?
They'll never say, or at least they will very rarely say, you know, one thing that strikes me, and I'm sure you've thought of it, but tell me what your thoughts on it are, because it's such an obvious problem, you know, what about this problem of warring, you know, principalities or whatever?
People won't ever say that.
They'll just say, well, it wouldn't work because of this.
And that's it.
Period.
End of story.
And that's kind of insulting, right?
Like, oh, of course.
You talk about getting rid of the government and people say, well, there's no way we could do it because there's too many people who need government help.
What would you do about the poor?
And they never sort of say it in a way like, hey, I wonder what would you do about the poor?
Or what would happen to the poor?
It's always like, what would you do about the poor?
You know, like they want to get you up in a half Nelson up against the wall or something.
And, you know, it's the same thing that you hear when you talk about a sort of privatized healthcare system.
People will never say, wow, that's interesting.
I've never heard that before, but I just don't really understand how would people be helped, if you don't mind me asking, how would people be helped who can't afford to pay?
You know, that's a respectful, civil, decent question.
And, you know, when I'm dealing with a Marxist or a Socialist or so on, you know, I like to ask them these questions, you know?
How was communism different in all of its manifestations around the world compared to the pure theory of communism?
And I don't mean sort of in terms of its intent, right?
Because intent, we sort of have an example of what happens when people have that power.
But in terms of the structure, right?
I mean, you guys did have a government who centrally controlled everything in Marxist theory.
Leninist Marxist theory.
So, you know, how was it different?
I mean, I'm not like, well, you know, don't you know they killed 20 million people?
I mean, anybody who's a Marxist or a communist or a socialist Trust me, they know all about the failures of communism.
They know all about the tens of millions who were killed under Mao and under Stalin and under all of the other communist rulers.
So you're not, you know, by demanding to know, you know, don't they know... I mean, you're sort of insulting them, right?
They know the history of communism probably a lot better than you or I do, so...
You know, you don't like it when people say, well, you know, it wouldn't work because of X, Y, and Z without ever asking you, who's probably read, you know, hundreds of books on the topic, how it might be solved.
You don't like that.
And I would suggest that It's also not a good idea to do to others, right?
I mean, as I've mentioned in a previous podcast, you know, the people you can never convert are the people who are in that foggy middle, you know, where they've just simply refused to think and have just swallowed everything that's been told to them.
You're not going to get them in motion.
But, you know, a socialist, a committed socialist or a Marxist or even a committed Republican, or Democrat, like people who've read, who understand, who think, who know the flaws of their own party, and who are concerned and worried about the future, and who are looking for better solutions, those people you can change, right?
Those people you might have a chance with, but sort of, you know, your next-door neighbor who, you know, works two jobs and lives in this foggy middle of reading the paper every other week and, you know, just thinks, yeah, well, okay, the country has problems, what can we do?
You know, that person, you know, if you want to practice, you know, why not?
But it's not exactly exquisite swordplay that's going to net you anybody new to the movement.
So, the two major issues that this gentleman wrote in to me about are... One is very common, and the other one is not so common.
So, you know, for me it's sort of interesting to take a swing at both of them.
And...
The first is the roads.
The roads, the roads, the roads.
What is it with these people and the roads?
I mean, it's just amazing.
You know, corporations can put up, you know, satellites to handle phone conversations world to world.
You know, private corporations can put together, you know, The next generation of the Intel processor with, I don't know, how many billion transistors, it can use the internet to deliver email, you know, fully verified, packet by packet, from one end of the world to another.
And, you know, the free market can do the most amazingly, mind-bendingly, mind-blowingly wonderful things.
But somehow, you know, rolling tarmac over sand is just completely beyond the free market, and there's just no conceivable way that it can work.
And that's just kind of funny.
I mean, it's kind of funny, and it's just part of the propaganda that people have.
So, I don't have... I'm driving, of course, so I don't have a prepared statement.
This is just sort of off the top of my head.
You know, things to think about roads.
Well, the first thing to think about roads, of course, is we have no idea if roads are the optimal solution, but we pretty much guarantee that they're not.
There's no reason to believe that roads, as they stand in just about every country in the world, that they are optimum solutions.
So asking the free market how they would reproduce a non-optimal solution is silly, right?
Because the free market generally does not produce, or at least doesn't produce for very long, non-optimal solutions.
And the reason that we don't know whether it's an optimal solution is that it's coerced and it's free, right?
So, I mean, if horses and carriages were free, then there would never be invented such thing as a car, right?
I mean, if secretaries were free, nobody would have invented, you know, word processing programs or voice dictation software or anything like that.
If messengers were free, like sort of run-on-foot messengers, then it would be unlikely that you would ever get a business like a sort of especially localized FedEx.
So, you know, when things are free and coerced, there's absolutely no way to know whether they're the optimal solutions.
Like, is it the optimal solution for me to drive to work for 30, 35, 40 minutes every day on my own, 50 kilometers and so on?
Well, Of course, one of the reasons that it is an optimal solution for me is that the roads are free.
Now, I take a private road, which I pay for, but I'm talking about the majority of people.
And, of course, the only reason the private road is worth it for me is that the public roads are such a mess.
They're always doing construction.
It's down to, like, one or two lanes perpetually, so, you know, you just spend another half hour on the road each way.
So, of course, there's no way, and it is sort of famous in traffic planning circles, it's a famous piece of knowledge, that you simply cannot solve traffic problems.
The government, for sure, cannot solve traffic problems.
And what that means is that, you know, if you, let's say there's some road that leads somewhere, Some highway that leads somewhere that is really bottled up and you can sort of magically snap your fingers and you can You know double the size of that highway, you know for a couple of months Everything's gonna hum along, but then people are basically gonna go wow you know Driving out there is really quick.
I could live out there and it would be so much cheaper.
Right?
Because the further away you live from the center of a metropolis, generally, the cheaper your housing becomes.
So people are going to drive further when traffic is better and they're going to buy homes further out.
So all you've done is you've put a sort of temporary alleviation on the problem for a fairly short amount of time and then what happens is that the value of homes that people have out there goes up, right?
So then people are tempted to sell.
You don't have to wait for a new cycle of construction.
It'll be as short as, you know, a couple of months.
So, there's a highway here called the QEW, and it's pretty slow.
When Christina bought her condo, she was able to get through her work in, you know, 25-30 minutes.
And, you know, after she bought her condo, it crept up and it crept up, and it's perfectly predictable, right?
That it went up to 50 minutes.
Because traffic was just so much slower, and if they put another lane in, then people would just buy their houses further out, and you'll end up with exactly the same problem again.
And the reason that people do that, of course, is because they have to spend some money on gas, but it's still not that much to spend relative to You know, if you had to pay for the actual road, right?
Like, the road that I take costs me about $150, $160 a month to drive on it for, I don't know, 35 kilometers each way.
And it's fantastic!
There's never any slowdowns, very rarely, when there are accidents.
People drive better, right?
They have more expensive cars, they're generally more professional, they're generally, you know, sort of older people and whatever, right?
Better drivers.
And they never have any construction during the day.
It's always at night, some weekends, right?
So you never have that problem.
And it's just a well-maintained, lovely, smooth, wonderful road.
And of course, I don't have to pay any sub to pay any tolls because it's electronic.
The toll is electronic.
I just get a bill at the end of the month.
So, you know, roads is something that, you know, the first thing to say is that, you know, there's simply no way that the free market would reproduce the road system as it currently exists.
and you know there's lots of better solutions so for instance uh... in um...
In New York, there was a subway system that was constructed, I don't know, I think it started in the 1910s and 20s and 30s and so on, entirely constructed by the private sector, right?
So, it's very efficient, right?
The New York subway system, at least up until the government took it over, was pretty efficient, right?
And we know that it was very efficient because, you know, when people are putting their own capital into moving people around, they're going to find the most optimum way to move people around.
And then what happened was the usual, right?
The government Through the pressure of the unions and, you know, so on, the government passed a law which said you can't raise the price of your subways or your buses or your streetcars.
And so, of course, you know, the company just basically went out of business because it wasn't able to raise to cover its costs.
Demand went up, especially in the time period that this happened and, you know, costs went up and they weren't able to To make a go of it, so the government, just because they were legislated, the price was legislated and therefore they just ran out of money and, you know, the government took it over.
So, you know, there for instance we can be pretty sure that at least when it was built it was the optimal solution because, you know, people putting millions and millions of dollars into constructing subways, you know, probably going to be researching every single conceivable angle to make sure it's as efficient as possible.
So that's sort of one example of, you know, the private sector can certainly do things like mass transit, right?
Now, the costs, of course, of owning and running a car are prodigious, right?
Even after it's paid off.
You know, it's $10,000 to $12,000 a year to run a car.
Is that the optimal solution for getting from A to B?
Well, I don't know.
I don't know.
It's hard to say.
It's hard to say.
It's certainly possible that if cabs were actual market price... Cabs are ridiculously expensive.
We're just hyperinflated because of regulations and because of these ridiculous license plates for cabs, you know, which cost $80,000 to $100,000 and just end up being, you know, preying on those who take cabs, right, which is often those who can't afford cars, and also those who drive cabs who are obviously not at the top of the economic chain.
The way that it preys on those is just horrible.
So, you know, if cabs were like one-fifth the price, would we all have cars?
I don't know.
Probably not, right?
Certainly fewer people would have cars.
And if fewer people had cars, we'd need fewer roads, right?
Possibilities of mass transit simply don't get explored because mass transit is almost always run by the government and heavily, heavily unionized, heavily political, and you can't change anything, right?
And, you know, Always prone to collapse, like there are these ads in Toronto on the subway.
Which I still take from time to time when I have to go downtown for a meeting.
There are these ads, you know, which is like, we need 30 billion dollars in renewal blah blah blah blah blah because we've been underfunded, right?
And basically they've just let their rolling stock and their, you know, the tracks and it's just, you know, they've just run to hell, right?
I mean, because, well, because it's political, right?
I mean, they got lots of money.
It just goes into sort of silly union nonsense and Additional layers and inefficient practices and, you know, over-management and pensions and, you know, everything but actually making things run from the standpoint of having an efficient public transit system.
And, I mean, I've seen this decline.
I mean, this transit system used to be fantastic.
Now it breaks down all the time and they're always out of money and they're always, you know, they're going on strike.
So, you know, it's definitely not optimal, the public transit system.
So the roads are not optimal, the public transit system is not optimal, taxis are not optimal, because they're all, you know, so heavily regulated and bullied about by the state.
So, you know, that's the first thing that I would say is just to recognize, get someone to recognize that we have no idea whether, to what degree it's, we know it's inefficient because it's coerced, but we don't know how, like, what the shape of things would be if If the government got out of the way, right?
Maybe there's a way that I could pick up a bus that came past my house and pick me up, like school buses do, or close enough, right?
So there's lots of ways that, or maybe, you know, if people had to pay the true costs of roads, then they would work from home more, right?
They would telecommute.
They would, obviously, if they had to pay the total costs of roads, they would tend to double up.
They would whatever, right?
So roads would be a lot better if the private sector ran them.
And, of course, you wouldn't have this endless construction that's just...
You know, they say in Toronto driving, Canadian driving, there's two seasons.
There's winter and there's construction.
And what they mean by that is it's either difficult to drive because it's snowy and icy or it's horrible to drive because construction is going on and you're always squeezed down to one lane.
Over two years now, they've been working on this one area of the highway, which is right in the core of everything, right where everything meets, and it's down to one or two lanes, and it's just been a nightmare.
It's one of the reasons that I ended up just having to take the private roads, because I kept trying to find a way to get to work that didn't involve construction.
But it just kept changing.
Like, I'd go this route, and it would be okay for a week or two, and then they'd start construction, and then I'd switch back to some other route, it'd be okay for a week or two, and they'd still have construction on the first route I started avoiding.
So, I mean, it's just nonsense.
It's nothing to do with efficiency, because there's no competition, right?
For the government, at least, right?
I mean, if you're the government, you like people to take the private roads, because you can then tax the corporation that runs the private roads, right?
It's beautiful.
And, of course, we don't even know what the true costs of roads are, because everything is so heavily unionized and bullied and coerced and so on.
So we have no idea what roads would look like in the free market.
And that's assuming that roads are the optimal solution, right?
We just don't know.
But, you know, there's lots of ways that you can get roads to pay for themselves, right?
You can put a GPS on a car, right?
And then you can just track where it goes in a month, and you can just send the money to the people that you've, you know, who built the roads that the car has used.
I mean, that's pretty easy to do.
That's sort of one way that that would make sense to pay for road repairs and road maintenance.
You know, if there's a mall at the end of a road, of course, they're not going to let the road crumble, right?
I mean, malls handle parking lots, right?
And they don't let the parking lots crumble, right?
They know that they have to have nice parking lots in order to get people to come to their mall.
I mean, that's pretty obvious, right?
I mean, a lot of people who shop at malls are older people.
And you sort of can't have this sort of wind-blown, icy parking lot with no cover.
Because, you know, they'll sort of get blown away.
So, you know, malls will absolutely maintain parking lots.
Private companies, of course, maintain parking lots.
And, you know, it seems like every other month they're doing something to the parking lot where I work.
And so that's pretty understandable that people have the private expertise to deal with this stuff.
And you don't sort of see it or pay for it.
It's just sort of rolled into your costs.
You don't pay for it directly.
So, you know, there's certainly the private expertise and, you know, a mall is going to need, if the government isn't running the roads, right, the mall is going to need the roads to be kept in good condition the same way that it needs the parking lot to be kept in good condition.
Because if there's no road leading to your mall, well, you know, you're probably not going to have a very successful mall.
I think that's fairly safe to say.
People don't often hike.
To get their ironing boards and so on.
So that's sort of one example.
And another example is that, of course, if you build something new, right?
Let's say you're building a housing development in the middle of nowhere.
Well, how are you going to sell your houses if people can't get to it, right?
I mean, you can have a helicopter pick up people from the real estate agent's place every Saturday morning.
Well, of course not.
You're going to have to build a road, or at least join to an existing road, so that people can get to your housing development, right?
If you build a factory somewhere, then you're not going to be able to hire any employees unless you build a road there.
I mean, it's all just so perfectly obvious, right?
And, well, if you're the employees, then, of course, this used to... When I worked up north, you'd see these logging roads, right?
And, you know, they were...
You know that they were optimal, right?
Because they were built on private land by private companies, right?
So they were, you know, use-at-your-own-risk kind of roads, you know, but, you know, they were pretty efficient.
And so, like, they were sort of flat enough to not cause damage to your truck, but, you know, they weren't so glossy flat that, you know, it cost a million dollars a mile to build.
So that's sort of an issue that people need roads, and it's the people who are building stuff that people need to get to who need to sort of worry about the roads.
Now, does that mean that, you know, the housing company is also going to become a road company?
Well, probably not, right?
Because they're going to want, you know, where it's complex long-term investment, they're going to want to outsource it.
So it's going to be a road company that builds all these things and so on.
And, you know, that's the same argument with just about anything, right?
I mean, it's like if there's a cable company in your neighborhood and they don't want to lay any cable to get to your house, then they're probably not going to be the most successful cable company in the world.
So there's just tons of different approaches as to why roads are built.
Any store anywhere needs road access, right?
I mean, assuming, again, that roads are optimal, which we don't even know for sure.
So roads are You know, not that complicated a topic, right?
They're needed.
They're well known, right?
The Romans were building them, and so it doesn't seem to me impossible that the free market can find some solution to road use, right?
And some combination of the incentive of needing people to come to your business or to your, you know, the homes that you're building or whatever, or to the factory that you're building.
I mean, that's one incentive.
If for the roads that already exist downtown where lots of people use them, well, store owners might just all chip in and do it for free, right?
So if you've got, you know, Yonge Street is the big street in downtown Toronto, you've got, you know, businesses jammed in cheek by jowl like books in a bookcase along the street, well, it would sort of make sense to me that they would all get together, you know, the same way that, you know, a mall uh... charges each one of its tenants some portion of rent to pay for parking lots and maintain it in the ice it and you know repair it and so on that's people would simply uh... just uh...
There would be an association that would simply charge everyone a certain amount of money, and that would be a condition of the lease, or if you owned it, you'd have to be asked or whatever.
And yeah, of course, there's the problem of the free rider and blah blah blah, but you know, that's really not such an issue, right?
I mean, the problem of the free rider or the problem of the commons doesn't really matter.
If somebody comes to you as a business, and you're part of a business association, and you're friends with everybody around, and you want to stay in people's good books or whatever, then you're not going to just say, no, I'm not going to pay the hundred bucks a year to maintain the roads.
Forget it!
Right?
I'm just gonna take that hundred and keep it to my evil bony chest.
I mean, that doesn't happen, right?
And even if it were to happen, so what?
I mean, there's so many ways to solve it.
To make that a negative for people, or to make it worth their while to spend a hundred bucks a year, or two hundred bucks a year to maintain the roads.
If you're a sort of shop owner on a street that you just have a slice of the road in front of your house.
What I would do is I would simply allow people to put up stickers saying, you know, I support my road or whatever and beautify the road or whatever.
And then, you know, the stores which didn't have that sticker would automatically be seen as people who were so focused on simple economic gain that They probably would not let you return your goods or would give you a hassle.
And if they're that concerned about money, they may not be charging you the best price.
You know, so people who don't get involved in something as simple as, you know, I'll pay a hundred bucks a year and instead I'm doing this free rider thing off everybody else's money.
People who do that, you know, generally aren't people you want to do business with.
So there's ways of making that well known either through the internet or through a sticker system.
So, you know, there's just no need to worry about that kind of stuff.
That's really not that big an issue.
All right, I've made it to work, and I've only copied one of my two topics, but that's usually half, at least, more than I usually get to.
So I'm going to stop here, and I will pick this up this afternoon.
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